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Victoria Tsai has an undergraduate degree from Wellesley, an MBA from Harvard, a resume filled with respected brand names and in 2009 launched Tatcha, a thriving beauty company. Somewhere in there she also got married and had a daughter. Still, her mother wasn’t impressed - until one day she appeared on QVC.

“Of all the things that I thought were going to make my mom proud, I don’t think she has ever been impressed until she turned on the television and saw me on QVC,” says Ms. Tsai. Ms. Tsai was introducing Tatcha’s skin care line which is based on the beauty rituals of the geisha as described both by the women themselves and a 200-year-old, three-volume manual which Ms. Tsai had translated into English.

The company, which is based in San Francisco but does its research and manufacturing in Japan, came out of Ms. Tsai’s desire to start her own venture and to satisfy her longtime interest in the beauty industry. Ms. Tsai’s parents came to the United States from Taiwan in 1977 and Ms. Tsai grew up working in her mother’s Houston beauty store. Not only did she learn first-hand about her mother’s entrepreneurial spirit, but she also learned that skin care is a highly personal business.

“When you ask someone about their skin, they often tell you about their life,” she says. “Selling and counseling on beauty is an intimate experience.” Ms. Tsai says her own skin has been a problem. It was her search for a solution to her acute dermatitis that led to a meeting with a geisha on a trip to Kyoto and eventually the philosophy behind Tatcha. “She (the geisha) was like art work and I thought if anybody is going to know about makeup it’s going to be these ladies,” says Ms. Tsai. “I haven’t seen skin like that on anybody but children.”

Ms. Tsai declines to give out figures but says the first round of financing came from her engagement ring, her furniture and her car. “I miss that ring, I’m not even going to pretend,” she says (the ring brought in a much-needed $30,000). A second round of financing came from family and her three co-founders. Since then there have been two more rounds of fundraising. Sales have tripled every year since the company started, she says. Tatcha can now be found online as well at 11 Barneys stores across the United Sates and at nine Joyce boutiques in Hong Kong.

Tatcha has grown to almost 30 employees, including Ms. Tsai’s husband, and last April moved its headquarters from the Tsai’s suburban home to an office in the city’s hip Potrero Hill neighborhood. “Thank goodness because we had 15 people in there everyday,” says Ms. Tsai. “The boxes were stacked head-high.”

While Ms. Tsai insists that she is not a Japanophile, Tatcha is built on the traditions that she discovered among the geishas in Kyoto. “The heart of their skin care ritual is purifying which is the opposite of the western world,” she says. “We’ll use cheap cleanser and expensive moisturizer. They spend time and money on the purifying product. The better you’re able to return your skin to its natural state the more you’ll be able to hold onto the natural moisturizers.” Among Tatcha’s signature products are the camellia oil, a cleanser, and the rice enzyme powder, an exfoliant.

Meanwhile, Ms. Tsai came up with the name Tatcha by combining parts of two Japanese words that she says reflect the company’s values. The first is tatehana, a form of ikebana. The second word is chaban, a reference to part of the Japanese tea ceremony. Ms. Tsai found that the words resonated with her commitment to simple, thoughtful beauty. Note, Tatcha does not use parabens, mineral oils, synthetic fragrances, sulfate detergents or phthalates. It does use green tea, Okinawa red algae, silk, peony and rice bran.

Among Tatcha’s current bestsellers is a series of products that use indigo, an ingredient that many people consider simply a dye but which Ms. Tsai also says is a proven anti-inflammatory and soothing to the skin. Ms. Tsai says that in Japan it’s referred to as “Samurai blue” as during the Edo period the samurai wore indigo-dyed cotton under their armor to help heal their skin.

Ms. Tsai has a few beauty tips that aren’t part of Tatcha’s line. Of all the geishas that she knows age 20 to 80, she was told that the one with the best skin enjoyed a bit of sake. “I remember thinking hallelujah,” says Ms. Tsai, adding that the fermented rice drink is both anti-inflammatory and moisturizing. Ms. Tsai gave up alcohol a year ago, but found a solution: she puts a cup or two of sake in her bath water.

Ms. Tsai has no doubts that her mother is proud of her accomplishments and not just because of her many appearances on QVC. “I know she’s proud. She’s not the type to say very easily that she’s proud. She’s a little bit stingy with the compliments like any good Asian mother,” she says.